Cloud-based Video Encoding Pioneer Zencoder Secures $2 Million in Funding
Leading Video Encoding Company and YCombinator Alum Funded by Top Silicon Valley, Seattle Investors; Unveils Technology at NAB Show 2011
San Francisco(12 Apr 2011)
In response to overwhelming market demand and adoption of online video, Zencoder, the performance leader in cloud-based video encoding, today announced that it has secured $2 million in funding. The funding will be used to accelerate Zencoder’s rapid growth and technology leadership. Zencoder was founded in 2010 with seed money from Y Combinator and top Silicon Valley-based angel investors.
Participants in this round include Andreessen-Horowitz, Ignition Partners, SV Angel, Lowercase Capital, Founder’s Collective, 500 Startups, and a host of individuals who have made a mark in cloud computing including Matt Cutts, James Lindenbaum, Orion Henry, Adam Wiggins, Wolfgang Buehler, Mike Bollinger, and Neil McClements.
“While demand for online video has continued to boom, traditional video encoding methods can’t keep up with scalability challenges, or the ever-changing standards required to publish video on new devices,” said Jon Dahl, Zencoder CEO and co-founder. “Zencoder’s cloud-based platform offers customers future-proof encoding that is elastic and highly scalable, providing quick turnaround, outstanding video quality, and universally accessible video.”
Zencoder is widely regarded as a technology leader in video encoding performance, platform scalability and reliability, delivering a 99.9% encoding success rate. Zencoder encodes most video in less time than the actual length of the video, even traditionally time-intensive HD video. The technology employs an easy to use REST API, enabling Zencoder’s customers to easily access enterprise-quality encoding technology without requiring any upfront hardware investments or continued maintenance costs. Zencoder works with hundreds of customers worldwide, including PBS Television, TwitVid, Posterous and College Humor.
An avid supporter and contributor to open source software, Zencoder created the popular VideoJS HTML5 Video Player. Built with Javascript and CSS, VideoJS works on all major HTML5 platforms for both web and mobile, and automatically reverts to Flash if HTML5 video is not supported. Zencoder’s VideoJS HTML 5 video player is the most widely deployed open source HTML 5 player available.
What our Customers Say…
"When we built video support into PBworks, we chose Zencoder because of its unwavering commitment to compatibility and quality, plus the added value of easy to use tools to check on our jobs with reliability so solid we've never given our decision a second thought,” said David Weekly, Founder and Chief Product Officer of PBworks. “Zencoder’s transcoding services let PBworks provide secure video sharing in a compelling service to our customers, including ESPN!"
"Zencoder has made a huge impact on our company and our users. Before switching to Zencoder, we had gone through several rounds of custom internal encoding systems, each with its’ own unique set of problems” commented Michael Christopher, SchoolTube. “Since moving to Zencoder most all issues from specialized video codecs and accurate thumbnail generation to video processing time bottlenecks have all but disappeared. We've been extremely happy with Zencoder and it has allowed us to focus our resources on the ingestion and delivery of content instead of trying to figure out why a certain video is locking up our servers."
What Our Investors Say….
"Zencoder is on top of the enormous market shift presented by the move to the cloud, and applies great technology and vision to the exploding internet video market. They are the right team to lead this revolution," said Ron Conway, founder of SV Angel.
“Brilliant team, exploding market need, adoring customers, killer technology — we at Ignition are impressed. We're excited to be working with Zencoder,"said Brad Silverberg, Igniton founding partner and former Microsoft executive.
"A team of the video realm's smartest hackers beating the pants off all competitors in a space that is growing exponentially? It took me one meeting to know I wanted to work with Zencoder," said Chris Sacca, former Google executive, founder and managing director of Lowercase Capital.
"Zencoder has a superior product and has already demonstrated impressive execution ability. We are excited to be involved," said David Frankel, founder and managing partner of Founder's Collective.
"Zencoder represents the qualities we believe are the future of cloud services: it's a focused solution from a strong team of domain experts, uses curated technologies to produce industry-best results, is available on-demand, can be integrated instantly, and is designed by and for developers," said James Lindenbaum, founder of Heroku along with Adam Wiggins and Orion Henry, all investors.
For more information about Zencoder, please visit http://zencoder.com. For Zencoder’s well documented API, go to http://zencoder.com/docs/api/.
To sign up for a free Zencoder account, visit: http://zencoder.com/pricing. The open source VideoJS viewer is available for free download at http://videojs.com/.
About Zencoder
Zencoder is the performance leader in reliable, fast, high-quality cloud-based video transcoding. Founded in 2010, its products enable content providers to quickly deploy Internet video to consumers on virtually any Internet connected device. The founder’s technology vision dates back to 2008 when the team pioneered cloud-based encoding as a service with On2 Technologies (now Google). Zencoder was founded by Jon Dahl, Brandon Arbini, and Steve Heffernan, a team of engineers intent on removing the complexities of putting video online and committed to making scalable, high-performance video encoding available to developers and businesses everywhere.
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Zencoder disclaims any proprietary interest in the marks and names of others.